Short Take: Why is penal substitutionary atonement so attacked by "progressive" Christians?

Brandon, why is the issue of penal substitution so anathema with progressive Christians? They call it cosmic child abuse.

Did God kill Jesus? This is something that's highly rejected. I think we know why, because they reject the gospel, they reject the faith, and this is the core of the faith.

Talk about that and how The Shack, that very, very popular book that many, many Christians read, made into a very popular movie, how that was a subversive element on this issue. People somehow think that the love of God and the justice or wrath of God are somehow opposites, when really they're completely linked and compatible. If you are unjust, if you think that God can be loving instead of just, then you're saying that God was unjust in order to be loving. Well, if you are unjust, that's an unloving thing. Injustice is not loving. A judge who allows evil to go unpunished is an evil and unloving judge.

So you can't separate those attributes. And that's really, throughout the film, Tony Jones will refuse to acknowledge that God has to be both just and loving. And you'll see him go to the point of saying God doesn't need to be beholden to any attributes at all.

He can just basically do whatever he wants, which is crazy. At the core, really, people just hate the idea of a just God who punishes sin. Progressive Christians particularly may want justice in this world. They talk a lot about social justice, but when God's version of justice is aimed toward them or us, it becomes a completely different story.

Nobody likes that. We don't like the idea of hell or the wrath of God. And that's what you see in the book and movie, The Shack. The author, William Paul Young, denies the wrath of God and kind of presents the idea that Jesus's death accomplished the reconciliation for all of sinners. And we really see his views more clearly in a book that came out later called Lies We Believe About God. And in that, he expresses his view that the idea that it was God's idea for Jesus to die on the cross, that that is us worshiping a cosmic abuser. So he's agreeing with this cosmic child abuse claim.